I really can’t feel anything but a sick sense of shame at what Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Gonzalez and Addington and Yoo, among other enablers) did at places like Guantanamo and Bagram. As more details come out I expect that feeling to strengthen. The latest update from hilzoy (There are no files, part 2) was the latest thing to bring that home to me.

3 Responses to “What’s Been Going on at Guantanamo”

The lack of organization and associated oversight indicates that the abuses taking place over the past eight years were not the actions of “a few bad apples”.

It is a systemic problem that goes far beyond incompetence on a massive scale.

The profound disorganization shows an utter contempt of justice and is symptomatic of a malicious government run amok.

The light of day has shown the Bush Republican administration’s nightmarish yet high-handed pronouncements on the nature of the detainees, the supposed purpose of the prisons, and the efficacy of the US military’s process of gathering intelligence from the detainees can now be seen for what they were.

They were flagrant propaganda statements that provided a smokescreen for inhumane acts of retribution against people who fit the profile of “evildoers” regardless of the prisoners’ actual guilt, motives, or innocence.

It has been a dark eight years, but now the light is beginning to show how totally the Bush Republican administration was anathema to civilized behaviour.

It’s not going to be easy to cure the cancer that has spread throughout your government and military structures over the past eight years. I wonder if it is even possible.

Something that occurred to me while reading this was that Guantanamo represents what the federal reaction to Katrina would have been had there been no media coverage. In short, Brownie would have stayed in charge, people would have kept dying, and the only response from Bush would have been to deny all blame (or even the existence of anything blameworthy) while sprinkling Presidential Medals of Freedom on all the incompetent and/or evil twits he’d put in charge.

And then the White House added an even broader loophole. The order says flatly that the Army Field Manual will be the only guide for interrogation — “unless the attorney general with appropriate consultation provides further guidance…”
Isn’t that what the Bush Administration did with Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al Qaeda figure it captured after 9/11? When polite methods crafted for uniformed POWs failed because he had been trained to resist them, the CIA turned to President Bush and the attorney general and asked what else they could do. That is a path President Obama has roundly condemned but now seems to contemplate for his own administration.